YESTERDAY, I discussed the potential partial demise of the Gothic Surf Shop, a group of four adjacent Lower Queen Anne houses where several artists and photographers live and work.

(You can see some other examples of the endangered species that is local, affordable artist’s space during next weekend’s “Art Detour,” a program of self-guided studio tours around town.)

I’d been there at a party which was centered in the houses’ joint back yard and trailed off into the various live-work spaces. I found myself repeatedly wandering back to one particular room, where a prominent photographer showed off some of her exquisite hand-tinted, neoclassical portraits and nudes.

This lusciously sensual exhibition, and the path leading toward it, reminded me a lot reminded me, in a low-budget DIY way, of a book I’d read that week–The Little House: An Architectural Seduction, an odd 18-century short story by Jean-Francoise De Bastide.

In the story, a wealthy French libertine nobleman has commissioned a country estate for the specific purpose of seduction. Every inch of the place, from the entrance-court to the gardens to the individual rooms, is meant to stir a woman’s senses (except her sense of resistance).

It’s published in an elegant, tiny paperback by none other than the Princeton Architectural Press, in an edition loaded with introductory remarks about the use of storytelling to explain principles of architecture and decoration.

You don’t have to approve of the story’s antihero and his predatory motives to admire his devotion to the home arts and his obsession with detail (as illustrated in the Princeton edition with period line drawings of real chateaus similar to the story’s fictional one.)

And you don’t have to be a nostalgist for pre-revolutionary France’s ornate architectural excesses to long for a sense of design that cared this much about the human spirit, about nurturing the senses, instead of just about mounting the most square footage for the least amount of money (or, in the case of most rich-people’s residential construction, intimidating people with out-of-scale behemothness).